21 Apr New Directions

Born in Uganda, Youth Coordinator Denise Birungi Evans joined the local nonprofit Hillsborough County Anti-Drug Alliance (HCADA) in 2013 after completing her bachelor’s degree in public health.

Denise is focused on training students to raise awareness of the dangers of tobacco use (including vaping) among their peers in a statewide group called SWAT, Students Working Against Tobacco. She works hand-in-hand with eight chapters–300 kids–led by volunteer advisors in Hillsborough public schools to mobilize, educate and equip young leaders to educate not only their peers but also policy makers about the need to change social norms related to tobacco use and expose and deglamorize Big Tobacco’s insidious marketing efforts.

Denise loves her job, she says, because it’s about “sharing information that can change lives. There’s so much misinformation online, but HCADA is the resource anyone can turn to.”

“My job is hard to quantify,” she says. “It’s hard to justify prevention programs like ours—even though we know they’re incredibly impactful—because we can’t say we saved 14 kids from addiction, 12 from drunk driving accidents and 16 from cancer because we prevent underage drinking and drug or tobacco use.” But she’s passionate about providing education and resources to these kids.

Denise herself learned the value of education at a young age. “I was the last of 11 children” she says. “I went to a Catholic boarding school at 11 or so, and my mother told me if I got expelled, I wasn’t going to go back to school. She’d use that money to pay for someone else’s kid to go to school. And I knew she meant it: A mother with that many kids, when she says something, she’s not playing with you.”

Denise was drawn to the sciences and wanted to be a nurse or doctor, initially, but she completed a degree in accounting in Uganda because a family connection gave her very good job prospects in that field.

Then love intervened, when she became pen friends with a young man named Gary. They corresponded for three years, and then he came to visit her in 2004. “And the rest is history,” she laughs.

Denise and Gary married and lived initially in the U.S. Virgin Islands, before the Florida native brought his bride home to Tampa.

Her educational credits from Uganda didn’t transfer, so Denise started her education all over again, earning a GED and then beginning to follow her dream of studying to become a nurse. “And then I took a public health class,” she says, “and I was hooked.” Denise has since completed a bachelor of science in public health at the University of Tampa, a local university, but felt she wasn’t finished learning—and wasn’t willing to wait for that school to establish their public health graduate program—so she did her research and found an accredited online program she liked at the University of New England. And completed that while working at HCADA!

Her online studies have certainly come in handy lately, as coronavirus social distancing and school closings have forced the SWAT advisors and students to get creative about maintaining their meetings.

“It’s been so great to see the advisors and kids finding new solutions—great solutions—to stay connected and active,” she says. In-person, after-school presentations that had been planned became video presentations and collages and poster designs shared to Instagram. After-school, face-to-face meetings weren’t cancelled; they were moved online to platforms like Zoom and Google Hangouts. Because when they have an inspiring advocate to follow, community mobilization efforts and passionate young leaders wait for no pandemic.

Now a decade after starting her life in one direction, Denise is delighted with the way things have turned out. Long gone are her days as a single accountant in Uganda, replaced by a fulfilling life as wife, counselor and guide to hundreds of children in America. It goes to show that we each can write our own stories, and we don’t have to know the ending when we begin.

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